Mitt hoping Solyndra trumps Bain

Republicans haven't had much luck proving that Solyndra is synonymous with government graft.

Still, Mitt Romney and a super PAC supporting him are giving Solyndra a try on the trail, unveiling ads that wield the $535 million energy loan scandal as a double-whammy: an indictment of big government spending and the answer to Romney’s private equity problem.

Story Continued Below

The argument: Solyndra is the best example of President Barack Obama's stimulus at its worst, complete with a cozy donor in deep with a company that got taxpayer money only to file for bankruptcy and lay off 1,100 workers. Forget Romney's record at the private equity firm Bain Capital — look at Obama's public investment failure.

The new ads signal how the Romney campaign and American Crossroads are going to attack Obama’s economic record — betting that even if voters have never heard of the failed solar power company with the futuristic-sounding name, they can turn it into an example of Obama's flawed strategy for economic recovery and an emblem of why tax and spend liberalism doesn't work.

Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt responded that the president is happy to debate energy policy with Romney.

"What Mitt Romney has made abundantly clear over the past year is that he'd cede the clean energy market and jobs that come with it to China,” LaBolt said. “He's been campaigning across the country, attacking investments in clean energy, while other countries are racing to capitalize on that market."

Still, if Romney is going to pick a stimulus project gone awry, Solyndra is a promising choice. Not only did the company collapse, but White House emails have revealed red flags that the company’s business model was fraught. The company's strategy was to make relatively expensive solar equipment at a time when inexpensive Chinese panels were pushing prices down.

House Republicans dredged up the less-than-flattering administration emails as part of an investigation, but they didn’t unearth evidence that a corrupt quid pro quo helped the company land its $535 million Department of Energy loan guarantee.

The emails included White House energy adviser Heather Zichal’s now-famous remark that Solyndra had become a “*#~@ show.” Other documents revealed that Office of Management and Budget staffers worried about the “optics” if Solyndra defaulted on its loan guarantee during the 2012 campaign.

The Romney campaign’s ad uses the bankrupt California solar manufacturer as a launching pad to go after the Energy Department's entire clean energy initiative — ticking off a series of green companies that ran into financial trouble, and implying that the program amounted to the president “giving taxpayer money to big donors, and then watching them lose it.”

Karl Rove's American Crossroads hit similar themes in its new ad which explicitly invokes Solyndra and the auto bailout to counter Obama's attacks on “private equity” — read: Bain.

Conservative pundits have done the same recently. Michael Barone cited the solar company Monday as one reason why Obama's Bain strategy could backfire. And George Will told Jennifer Granholm on ABC's “ This Week” that if Bain is fair game, then “it would be fair for Romney to say, 'Look at Solyndra — they laid off 1,100 people.'”

Solyndra also allows the Republican to counter the president's focus on Bain investments in companies that wound up going under.

Republicans have also been able to point to the role of Obama bundler George Kaiser as the founder of a venture capital firm that's a major investor in Solyndra.